Alberto Abad Gareta

Alberto Abad Gareta is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DEI) of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, and a researcher at INESC-ID. He coordinates the Human Language Technologies (HLT) laboratory and serves as deputy coordinator of the Master in Computer Science and Engineering at IST. His research focuses on speech processing, healthcare applications, and privacy-preserving techniques. He holds IEEE Senior member, ACM, and ISCA memberships.

Education:

• PhD in Telecommunication Engineering, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), 2007
• Telecommunication Engineering Degree, UPC, 2002

Research Interests: His work spans robust speech recognition, speaker/language characterization, applied machine learning, healthcare applications, and privacy in speech processing. Key areas include developing computational tools for disease detection (e.g., Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s) and enhancing privacy in speech-based systems. These efforts align with his leadership in projects like Accelerat.ai and PRIVADIA.

Grants & Projects:

• Principal Investigator (PI) of FCT-funded VITHEA (virtual aphasia therapy)
• INESC-ID/IST PI for Accelerat.ai (conversational AI)
• Contributions to EU projects like DIRHA (home automation) and BioVisualSpeech (speech therapy)

Advising & Teams: Supervised 25+ M.Sc. and 1+ Ph.D. theses (plus 5 ongoing). His lab, HLT, collaborates with industry and startups, focusing on speech analytics for health, education, and smart environments.

Labs/Teams: Leads the HLT lab at INESC-ID, fostering interdisciplinary research in speech and language technologies with a focus on clinical and privacy-sensitive applications.